Joe Soucheray: After Sandy Hook, time to talk about limits on guns

The word "need" becomes carefully parsed by gun owners on high alert for people who use the word "need" as it pertains to owning a so-called assault rifle.

If I were to say, for example, that you -- meaning the lot of us -- don't need a high-capacity magazine for purposes of holding as much ammunition as possible to spend as quickly as possible to inflict as much damage as possible, I would be met with, and have been, by people saying, "Well, you don't need a car."

Yes, I do.

And I am perfectly willing to agree that you -- meaning whoever is legally qualified -- need to own a gun. They are useful tools to own.

So, and keeping in mind we are trying to get our heads around the unknowable horror of Sandy Hook Elementary School, let us agree that I need a car and you need a gun, or that I need a gun and you need a car.

What I don't need is a car with a jet engine bolted to the roof.

I need a car because the bus doesn't suit my schedule or the train isn't ready yet or because I have to haul equipment for my landscaping business, or, well, the reasons are endless why we need cars. Like a gun, they are useful tools to own. But I don't need a car that eclipses the boundary of what is reasonably thought to be the purpose of the invention in the first place.

With a jet engine bolted to the roof, I could probably get from here to Duluth in about six minutes, but that isn't what a car is for. Not to mention that I probably would be in violation of a dozen laws.

Advertisement

Because it is possible, I suppose, to order a jet engine from Pratt & Whitney and then figure out how to bolt it to the roof of my car doesn't mean that it would be something I would do. That takes me from need to want, or wanton.

The 20-year-old disturbed and, yes, evil man who showed up at Sandy Hook Elementary School showed up with a jet engine.

But good and responsible gun owners have to know that Sandy Hook is a game changer. The children were shredded.

I believe the nation owes those children and their parents a heartfelt reckoning. And because they are good and responsible, gun owners can lead the way, getting out in front of the politicians.

The country seems to be divided into two factions. On the one side are the people who wish to ban assault rifles, meaning a weapon that fires, semiautomatically, a bullet with each squeeze of the trigger. On the other side are those who would wish to ban gun-free zones so that teachers and principals and theater managers and mall cops be armed so that they can intervene in the event that evil shows its face.

Well, we are not going to get rid of guns and we are not going to be free from evil and mental illness and alienation and lost souls. So where are we? Maybe we should tone down the equipment, limiting the ability of madness to commit mayhem with jet engines.

Magazines with less capacity -- I don't even know the number -- do not threaten my liberty nor do they corrupt the Second Amendment, written with a quill pen at a time when the equipment was a musket. Good and responsible gun owners are not interested in committing mayhem, anyway. They certainly don't need the capacity to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Nor does evil.

Slippery slope? No. There are an estimated 300 million guns in America. They cannot and will not be taken. Nor should they be.

I need a car, up to and including a Ferrari, if I could afford one. But I don't need a jet engine bolted to it.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5474. Soucheray can be heard from 3 to 6 p.m. weekdays on 1500ESPN.

A message is seen on a candle outside the St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, Saturday, Dec. 15, 2012, in Newtown, Conn. A man killed his mother at their home and then opened fire Friday inside the Sandy Hook Elementary school, massacring 26 people, including 20 children, as youngsters cowered in fear to the sound of gunshots reverberating through the building and screams echoing over the intercom. (AP Photo/David Goldman)